Father and Mother
From a young boy, I witnessed the injustices and manipulations of our government—mostly through our news media. At eight years old (1967), I watched Walter Cronkite each night solemnly report the day’s troop losses in Vietnam: 52 one evening, 34 the next, 87 after that, then the fall of some tragic hilltop or the burning of a city. Our nation was still basking in the afterglow of having defeated two evil empires at the same time—Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan.
Yet with every broadcast, that proud bravado was chipped away by Cronkite’s measured words and the grim reality delivered into every living room.
I voiced my unease to my father. I couldn’t believe his reaction when he shouted at me that this was Walter Cronkite—the most trusted man in America—and there was no way he would spread hatred or lies.
As I grew older, I came to see the war as part of a larger global manipulation. Eventually, I realized that nearly everything outside my own walls should be tuned out—everything except the truths that quietly infiltrate a family. But that epiphany took 55 years of living to reach.
In my youth, my focus should have been on what was happening inside my own home—first as a boy, then as a young man, and later as a father. I should have ignored anything that didn’t directly serve the daily growth and well-being of me and then my family.
One of the finest novels ever written in American literature is The Prince of Tides by Pat Conroy. Its opening two pages, in my view, are the most powerful and enduring in all of American fiction. These are the words we should pass down to our children and weave into our culture—the best of America, not the tarnished pronouncements of paid mouthpieces.
Here are the first two pages of Pat Conroy's, The Prince of Tides.
PROLOGUE
My wound is geography. It is also my anchorage, my port of call.
I grew up slowly beside the tides and marshes of Colleton; my arms were tawny and strong from working long days on the shrimp boat in the blazing South Carolina heat.
Because I was a Wingo, I worked as soon as I could walk; I could pick a blue crab clean when I was five. I had killed my first deer by the age of seven, and at nine was regularly putting meat on my family's table. I was born and raised on a Carolina sea island and I carried the sunshine of the low-country - inked in gold on my back and shoulders. As a buy I was happy above the channels, navigating a small boat between the sandbars with their quiet nation of oysters exposed on the brown flats at the low watermark.
I knew every shrimper by name, and they knew me and sounded their horns when they passed me fishing in the river. When I was ten I killed a bald eagle for pleasure, for the singularity of the act, despite the divine, exhilarating beauty of its solitary flight over schools of whiting. It was the only thing I had ever killed that I had never seen before. After my father beat me for breaking the law and for killing the last eagle in Colleton County, he made me build a fire, dress the bird, and eat its flesh as tears rolled down my face. Then he turned me in to Sheriff Benson, who locked me in a cell for over an hour. My father took the feathers and made a crude Indian headdress for me to wear to school.
He believed in the expiation of sin. I wore the headdress for weeks, until it began to disintegrate feather by feather. Those feathers trailed me in the hallways of the school as though I were a molting, discredited angel.
“Never kill anything that’s rare,” My father said.
"I’m lucky I didn’t kill an elephant,” I replied.
"You'd have had a mighty square meal if you had," he answered.
My father did not permit crimes against the land. Though I have hunted again, all eagles are safe from me.
It was my mother who taught me the southern way of the spirit in its most delicate and intimate forms. My mother believed in the dreams of flowers and animals. Before we went to bed at night as small children, she would reveal to us in her storytelling voice that salmon dreamed of mountain passes while the brown faces of grizzlies hovering over clear rapids. Copperheads, she would say, dreamed of placing their fangs in the shinbones of hunters. Ospreys slept with their feathered, plummeting dreamselves screaming through deep, slow-motion dives toward herring. There were the brute wings of owls in the nightmares of ermine, the downwind approach of timber wolves in the night stillness of elk.
But we never knew about her dreams, for my mother kept us strangers to her own interior life. We knew that bees dreamed of roses, that roses dreamed of the pale hands of florists, and that spiders dreamed of luna moths adhered to silver webs. As her children, we were the trustees of her dazzling evensongs of the imagination, but we did not know that mothers dreamed.
Each day she would take us into the forest or garden and invent a name for any animal or flower we passed. A monarch butterfly became an "orchid-kissing blacklegs"; a field of daffodils in April turned into a "dance of the butter ladies bonneted. With her attentiveness my mother could turn a walk around the island into a voyage of purest discovery. Her eyes were our keys to the palace of wildness.